The Mark Foley Scandal: Sex, Lies, and Family Values

[Walter Brasch]

by Walter Brasch

	The parents of a 16-year-old Congressional page contacted
their congressman, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.).
	Alexander says he contacted both Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.),
chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) who oversees the page program. 
	Reps. Shimkus, Reynolds, and House Majority Leader John A.
Boehner (R-Ohio) admit they knew about it in 2005. 
	Kirk Fordham, Reynolds’ former chief of staff, told the
Associated Press that three years ago, he had “more than one
conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the
House of Representatives to intervene.” 
 	Reynolds and Boehner say they told Rep. Dennis Hastert
(R-Ill.), speaker of the house. 
	Hastert says Reynolds may have told him about it, but he
doesn’t remember. 
	At no time, did anyone contact police or the FBI. Their
concerns for justice were shallow; their fears that a scandal
would affect their re-elections were deep. 	The conservative
Washington Times and several major conservative columnists
have called for Hastert to resign. 
	For his part, President George W. Bush says he supports
Hastert, doesn’t want him to resign, and called him a “father,
teacher, coach who cares about the children of this country.”
Almost as an afterthought, he said he was “dismayed and
shocked.”
	What President Bush was “dismayed and shocked” about were the
actions of Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida.
The President apparently wasn’t dismayed or shocked about the
cover-up the Republican leadership undertook to keep the
information from the public, the contacts with Foley to warn
him about his conduct, and their failure to discipline one of
their members. 
	The story broke in early September when a relatively new
blog, Stop Sex Predators (www.stopsexpredators.blogspot.com),
reported that Foley, a six-term congressman who was co-chair
of Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, had sent sexually
explicit e-mails and text messages to the 16-year old male
Congressional page. Within two weeks, ABC-TV’s Brian Ross, and
then the rest of the nation’s major media, picked up the
story. The day after Ross’s first report, Foley resigned.
Subsequent reporting revealed that Foley may have had other
inappropriate contacts, dating back to at least 2003.
	Trying to spin his own actions, Foley said when he was a
teenager he had been abused by a member of the clergy; he now
admits he’s gay, and has checked himself into an alcoholic
rehabilitation facility. As for Reps. Alexander, Shimkus,
Reynolds, Boehner, and Hastert, and dozens of other
Republicans who knew of the problem, they shuffled and
wobbled, but never acknowledged why they didn’t take immediate
action at least six months earlier. 
	Spinning and diverting, Hastert is blaming liberals for their
reporting of the scandal; others have dug through the archives
to find that 23 years earlier a Democratic congressman was
censured for having sex with a 17-year-old page. (On the other
side of the aisle, and not reported by the Republicans, a
Republican congressman that year had sex with a 17-year-old
female page.) Many screeched out about former Sen. Gary Hart
(D-Colo.) and a rendezvous he had in 1988 with a woman on a
boat called “Monkey Business,” and of Ted Kennedy, MaryJo
Kopechne, and the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, hoping to
cloud the blame for their own problems. 
	Conservative Republicans devoutly proclaim themselves the
party of “Family Values.” They want the people to believe they
have been anointed with divine wisdom, sacred trust, and the
key to the Holy Morality. Democrats and liberals, they decree,
are sin-spewing heathens.  But, truth is not on their side.
	Rep. Robert Bauman (R-Md.), homophobic founder of Young
Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union, and
a darling of the Christian Coalition, lost his House seat in
1980 after disclosures that he solicited sex with a
16-year-old gay male; Bauman two years later acknowledged he
was gay. Donald Lukens (R-Ohio) was sentenced to jail for
having sex with a minor. The list of local and state
Republican officials who were arrested and convicted of
pedophilia or other sex crimes would choke even the most
forgiving defense attorney. But, let’s just look at the family
values of some of the Republicans recently elected or
re-elected to federal office. 
	The list of “family values” Republicans who committed
adultery, but continued to preach a doctrine of morality in
government, would fill the telephone book of a small city.
Among them are Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), and former Rep. Bob
Barr (R-Ga.), who were leaders of the impeachment proceedings
against President Bill Clinton; former presidential candidate
Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas); former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
(R-Ga.); former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.),  whom the
Republicans planned to vote into office in 1999 as Gingrich’s
successor, but whose career came unraveled by his admission of
“marital infidelities”; Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.), who had a
five-year extramarital affair with a woman 35 years his junior
and who later accused him of repeated assaults; and former
Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), who told the Spokane
Spokesman-Review that God pardoned her sins.
	Chenoweth was a “two-fer,” committing both sexual and legal
sins. While her campaign strategy was loaded with rhetoric
about family values and morals, she accepted illegal campaign
contributions and then failed to disclose receipt of more than
$50,000 for her 1994 campaign. She served three terms before
deciding not to run for a fourth term in 2000. Rep. Randall
(Duke) Cunningham (R-Calif.), a seven-term Congressman, who
accepted $2.4 million in bribes, pled guilty to charges of
conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Rep. Tom DeLay
(R-Texas), an 11-term congressman, was first forced to resign
as House majority leader after being indicted on charges he
conspired to violate Texas state election laws; amid growing
evidence of financial and ethical irregularities over several
years, DeLay resigned from the House in April 2006.	
	The Republicans, whose “big tent” campaign rhetoric
apparently still doesn’t include many minorities, is
represented by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). Lott resigned as
Senate majority leader in December 2002 after praising
segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), suggesting that
if Thurmond had been elected president on the Dixiecrat ticket
in 1948, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the
years.” Lott—who opposed the Voting Right Act and voted
against creating Martin Luther King Day—recently asked, “Why
do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They
all look the same to me.” 
	The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal touched mostly
Republicans, with one White House official charged with
obstructing a federal investigation.
	And there’s George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Condoleezza Rice, and John Ashcroft/Ambrose Gonzales, whose
six year reign is pepper-shot with lies and violations of even
the most basic codes of ethics. They are the cabal that had
nodded off prior to the al-Qaeda attack upon the United
States, and then lied to the people prior to launching an
invasion of Iraq, which had no ties to the 9/11 plot, no ties
to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, and no weapons of mass
destruction.
	 The Administration has also diverted, according to Bob
Woodward of the Washington Post, about $700 million from the
war in Afghanistan and the search for Osama bin Laden to
prepare for the invasion of Iraq. They awarded a no-bid $7
billion contract to Halliburton, which is now accused of war
profiteering, diversion of funds, and numerous other
questionable, illegal, or immoral practices. Billions of other
taxpayer-funded dollars went to other companies that are major
contributors to Republican candidates. 
	On domestic issues, the Bush–Cheney Administration has
violated the environment, and disregarded health care and the
working class, while holding the pursuit of obscene profits to
be their personal god. They have encouraged the use of torture
to gain information from even the remotest of suspects, and
have refused to give suspects a fair trial. They have created
fake news releases, bribed journalists, released secret
information about a CIA agent in retaliation for her husband
speaking out against Bush’s war in Iraq, illegally hacked into
confidential Democrat strategy files, illegally spied upon
both American citizens and the United Nations, invaded
innumerable Constitutionally-protected personal rights of
privacy, suppressed freedom of expression, and instilled fear
as justification for its actions. Perhaps they should no
longer be called “neocons,” but Vegomatic Republicans since
they believe they have a divine right to slice, dice, and chop
the Bill of Rights. 
	Sanctimoniously proclaiming themselves piously religious and
patriotic, they have forsaken both the Bible and the
Constitution. George W. Bush, when asked if he had consulted
his father prior to the invasion of Iraq, devoutly declared
that he had spoken to his “higher father.” His actions prove
that he has abandoned both his heavenly father and this
nation’s forefathers. So much for honoring thy father. 
	The salacious “family values” Republicans have become the
party of right-wing righteous indignation. But the closest any
of them will come to righteousness is their fervent prayers
for something tumultuous to happen so the media and the public
forget these latest elephant-sized transgressions. 

	[Assisting on this column was Rosemary Brasch. Walter
Brasch’s current books are America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The
Federal Government’s Violation of Constitutional and Civil
Rights and ‘Unacceptable’: The Federal Response to Hurricane
Katrina. Both are available through amazon.com and other
on-line sources. You may contact Dr. Brasch at
[e-mail]]